Unemployment rate drops to 8.3%, 243K jobs added

posted at 8:40 am on February 3, 2012 by Ed Morrissey

The US economy had a good month for job creation in December, according to the new report this morning from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. We added 243,000 net jobs and the unemployment rate fell two-tenths of a percent to 8.3%:

Total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 243,000 in January, and the unemployment rate decreased to 8.3 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job growth was widespread in the private sector, with large employment gains in professional and business services, leisure and hospitality, and manufacturing. Government employment changed little over the month.

There seemed to be a glimmer of hope on workforce participation, too, although not much motion:

After accounting for the annual adjustments to the population controls, the employment-population ratio (58.5 percent) rose in January, while the civilian labor force participation rate held at 63.7 percent. (See table A-1. For additional information about the effects of the population adjustments, see table C.)

The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons, at 8.2 million, changed little in January. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job. (See table A-8.)

In January, 2.8 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier. (The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work, and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. (See table A-16.)

The key measure of labor underutilization, the U-6 number, declined slightly on a seasonally-adjusted basis to 15.1% from 15.2% in December. That is the lowest U-6 number since February 2009, although it’s still far above the 8-9% range of the second Bush term. That measure dropped most significantly in the fourth quarter of last year, falling 1.2 points.

There were some changes made to the surveys this month, which is a routine part of adjusting for population shifts. In this case, it tended to be a wash for the overall jobless rate but lowered participation rates by three-tenths of a point. That’s why the report says that the civilian-population participation rate was unchanged at 63.7% when it had been 64.0% in December. The BLS will not restate past results as part of their update. The U-6 numbers are not based on that survey and so are more consistent within their series.

Employers have added an average of 201,000 jobs per month in the past three months. That’s 50,000 more jobs per month than the economy averaged in each month last year.

The Labor Department’s January jobs report was filled with other encouraging data and revisions. Hiring was widespread across many high-paying industries. Pay increased. And the economy added 200,000 more jobs in 2011 than first thought.

And the unemployment is nearly a percentage point lower than over the summer, when feared a recession was imminent. The last time the unemployment rate has dropped for five straight months was in late 1994.

January’s non-farm payroll with a 243k increase was sharply above a consensus increase of 150k with positive if undramatic back month revisions. The breakdown looks positive almost across the board with manufacturing at +50k particularly impressive. Workweek data was improved, sustaining an upwardly revised December level, though hourly earnings with a 0.2% rise merely met consensus. The unemployment rate saw another significant fall, by 0.2% to 8.3%, when the consensus was for no change, with the fall due to increased employment not losses in the labor force. The broader U-6 measure of labor market slack, after three straight 0.4% plunges, saw only a modest fall of 0.1% to 15.1%, but there can be no doubts over the positive nature of this report. There is only one obvious significant caveat, an unusually mild winter restricting the number of seasonal layoffs, which are always heavy in January. Unadjusted, January payrolls still fell by 2.689 mln.

We’ll see if this continues, or whether it plateaus as the CBO expects. If it continues, Barack Obama might start seeing his approval numbers sliding upward again.

Update: Zero Hedge points to a curious change in the number of people not in the labor force:

A month ago, we joked when we said that for Obama to get the unemployment rate to negative by election time, all he has to do is to crush the labor force participation rate to about 55%. Looks like the good folks at the BLS heard us: it appears that the people not in the labor force exploded by an unprecedented record 1.2 million. No, that’s not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month!

I’m looking at the A-16 historical record (for people not in the labor force, not seasonally adjusted), and the number of people 16 years or older not in the work force changed from 87,212,000 in December 2011 to 88,784,000 in January — which is an increase of 1.572 million, not 1.2 million. That doesn’t affect jobs added, which are calculated in a separate survey, but it would tend to impact the U-6 rate by increasing the denominator of the calculation, which would lower the resulting ratio or percentage. Let’s take a look at the raw numbers in those categories:

Want a job now (in thousands, total set) — 6495, up from 6135 in December

Plus, Available to work now — 2809, up from 2540

Plus, Discouragement over job prospects — 1059, up from 945

Plus, reasons other than discouragement — 1749, up from 1595

The drop in the U-6 looks like it’s indicating a decline when we’re in fact seeing a modest increase in discouragement, even with the added jobs.

Update II: Steve Eggleston writes to tell me that Zero Hedge was looking at seasonally adjusted figures from table A-1 while I was checking A-16. The change in A-1 is 1.177 million, rounded up to 1.2 million. Also for clarification, the “plus” items in the bulleted list above are subsets of the “Want a job now” category.

Blowback

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That’s what I suspected. There’s no way the unemployment rate drops at the rate it’s been doing so unless they’re just flat out removing millions of people from the workforce. And it’s shameful that they’re able to pull crap like this since we all know that the key statistic that everyone looks at is the unemployment rate. Why even bother reporting it anymore if it can manipulated so easily?

Oh hail the great emperor of the American empire. He has done it again.

liberal4life on February 3, 2012 at 8:49 AM

I guess you extend these same accolades to President Bush when he had 4.9% unemployment. Surely if you can get excited about an awful 8.3% unemployment, you must heap praise upon the man that had 4.9%. No? Well, I didn’t think so.

I don’t believe it. Even if it were true, 8.3% unemployment is horrible. This is sickening and it’s going to be celebrated by the media and probably by a lot of Republicans. The great new normal!

I say it’s a 50/50 chance that Romney will congratulate the President on 8.3% unemployment. I imagine it’ll be something like “I congratulate the President on the rise in jobs… but we can do better.” “RINObot applause RNObot applause”

In the war on terrorism or any war for that matter… when you have one side wanting to destroy your nation and the other side is nothing but a bunch of wimps, the wimps are going to lose.

We are in a battle for America. The one side wants to completely destroy our founding documents, our very way of life. They are ready to resort to fraud, lies and violence if necessary to achieve their ends. Too many on our side only seem to care about is creating some jobs. Who the heck do you think is going to win this battle?!

I woke up this morning feeling a bit more confident about our future… but I am also more determined in my position that I am not supporting Romney. I am sending Newt some money this morning. If Romney is our nominee I am voting 3rd party if there is a good candidate or I will not vote at all but I will not vote for Mitt.

I had so many great dreams of where our party would be at by now in this process. I was convinced, especially after the 2010 elections, that we would have a pretty good nominee in the lead and a clear strong conservative message of freedom going into the spring.. a message of inspiration, real hope for the future.

I have never ever been more disillusioned about the GOP. It is so disappointing.

The number of persons employed part time for economic reasons, at 8.2 million, changed little in January. These individuals were working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were unable to find a full-time job.

Nice try Bucky. Unless you’re like me and live in a deep red state-the economy still SUXS. We got out of Ill-ANNOYZ just in time. Do to Quinn’s high taxes and extreme government over-regulation of individuals, and ESPECIALLY businesses…the business are moving…to Indiana(I used to live 6 miles west of the Indy border)…Iowa…Wisconsin.
The economy’s great if you have a governor like Rick Perry, or Mitch Daniels.

These are seasonably adjusted numbers. What the 243,000 jobs number means is that we lost 243,000 fewer jobs that we expected to lose. Unadjusted numbers show that we actually LOST about 2.5 million jobs in January. That’s less than the 2.7 million usually lost in January (due to the end of Christmas hiring and bad weather hampering construction), so the BLS interprets that as an INCREASE of more than 200,000.

American economy always rebounds. For all you right wing nuts betting on bad economy on November 2012 will be very disappointed

liberal4life on February 3, 2012 at 8:50 AM

We are not betting on a bad economy. We see one when it’s staring us in the face and no amount of propaganda can alter reality. We have 30 million people out of work and the Emperor Zero’s method of dealing with that is to slowly scrub them out of the labor force.

If the economy really is turning around, great! One Swallow and all that. You realize we are still bleeding jobs at a horrific rate, right?

“an unprecedented record 1.2 million. No, that’s not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month!”

“Which means that the civilian labor force tumbled to a fresh 30 year low of 63.7% as the BLS is seriously planning on eliminating nearly half of the available labor pool from the unemployment calculation.”

If you remove enough people from the labor force no one will be unemployed but no one will have a job.

Well, I personally think the unemployment rate is higher, since some people have probably stopped looking or ran out of unemployment. Two days ago, American Airlines’ parent company AMR just announced here in Dallas that they’re laying off 13k workers (of course, the Union has to “approve” it) and probably closing Alliance Airport.

64.0% to 63.7% labor participation, in one single month. By all means, I’ll suck on that statistic, chumplett.

MNHawk on February 3, 2012 at 9:22 AM

unemployment has fallen by 2% for three successive months. in one year, the number of unemployed fell by 1.2 million people while the employment-to-population ratio stayed the same. good luck trying to obscure these facts.

Darrell West, director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, said, “Democrats are trying to give ownership of Congress to Republicans because the institution is dysfunctional and not addressing the jobs problem, and this is a way to tie blame to the GOP.”…

What did I miss? HotGas rules specifically state that you must share such information.

Bishop on February 3, 2012 at 9:24 AM

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It’s about the David Gregory “Grand Wizard” comment on MTP that he made regarding Herman Cain. He tweeted an apology for it on Twitter even though he made the gaffe on live television. David “Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent” Gregory has never apologized on air for his comment yet Sessi defended the gaffe as “not a big deal” and “no apology needed.”
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Don’t you remember? I think you were involved in the Sessi takedown but MNHawk has been relentless. I’m just piling on for the sake of piling on. The gaffe occurred when Cain was campaigning, of course.

American Airlines is laying off 13,000 people. It’s cause of the darn ATM’s.

DHChron on February 3, 2012 at 9:31 AM

You can’t point to one example and say A-HA, this company announced layoffs so the economy must be in bad shape. This is the kind of crap liberals pulled during the Bush years too. Even during a time of 4% unemployment there will be companies who lay off people and companies which go bankrupt. It’s how a dynamic economy works.

The numbers are still horrible, but the Democrats have no problem being hacks and saying Obama saved the day. It this keeps up, Romney will at best be competitive. It’s good the economy is turning around, but it’s not because of Obama.

- Take the number of unemployed (12,758,000 on a seasonal basis, which is higher than any point prior to February 2009).
- Add to it the number of people who are not officially part of the workforce, but want a job now (6,319,000 on a seasonal basis, higher than any point prior to December 2010). The “discouraged workers” and “those marginally attached to the workforce” are merely parts of this number as those who are part of those two subcategories had to say they looked for work sometime in the last 12 months but not in the last 4 weeks AND they were available to work the week the survey was taken.
- Divide that sum of those who want to work but are not (19,077,000, higher than any point prior to March 2009) by the sum of that number and the number of employed (141,637,000, lower than any point since February 2009 and just under 5 million under the record set in November 2007).

You get a truer measure of unemployment that, unlike the U-4 and U-5, is fully adjusted for seasonal factors. 11.9% of those who are potential members of the workforce are unemployed, a figure higher than any point since Feburary 2009. To be fair, the “want a job now” portion of this has only been measured since 1994, but the only time other than the Obama administration that this measure was a double-digit one were the first 9 months of 1994.

“We’ve brought the unemployment rate down after one of the worst economic meltdowns in American history. That meltdown was caused by Wall Street and by policies they lobbied and fought for. We finally have their mess a bit under control and now, you want to elect Mitt Romney? The candidate who has raised the most money from Wall Street this cycle? The man who made money from predatory venture capitalism? The man who is “not concerned about the poor?” America, we have a choice. We can continue on our long, road to recovery or we can hand the keys back to the folks who got us here in the first place.”

The bitterness from conservatives anytime any positive economic data is reported is sad to behold. Country first or something.

libfreeordie on February 3, 2012 at 9:36 AM

This reply will likely get me banned.

Let me tell you something, you scum sucking liberal douchebag. Liberalism has orchestrated the largest, most astonishing scale of devolution and destruction that our Earth has ever known.

Your pals in the MSM and in Hollywood have literally orchestrated the destruction of the only Free Nation on Earth, that is America.

I loathe you for what you have done.
I condemn you for condeming my children to a future of service to some sort of government.
I loathe you for influencing the minds of the innocent.
I loathe your corporate benefactors.
I loathe you.

The bitterness from conservatives anytime any positive economic data is reported is sad to behold. Country first or something.

libfreeordie on February 3, 2012 at 9:36 AM

.
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste!” – Rahm Emanuel

Suck it!
.
This is what is so great about Hot Gas! A simple story about unemployment statistics is blogged and a flame war breaks out, including napalm and Hellfire rockets, all before 9:45 AM. Too Cool!

And yes, the incredible tool that trumpets this accomplishment also “proved” that Grand Wizard doesn’t mean what the universal definition of the term means, because some woman self-published a book that attained the rank of 2,500,000 on Amazon.com, that used the term in a more benevolent form.

The numbers are still horrible, but the Democrats have no problem being hacks and saying Obama saved the day. It this keeps up, Romney will at best be competitive. It’s good the economy is turning around, but it’s not because of Obama.

IR-MN on February 3, 2012 at 9:39 AM

These numbers are pretty good. There’s no point in denying it. However, compared to other reoveries from deep recessions, these employment numbers are pretty tepid. Still, if the economy shows improvement, Obama can plausibly argue that things are getting better despitebecause of his leadership.

A month ago, we joked when we said that for Obama to get the unemployment rate to negative by election time, all he has to do is to crush the labor force participation rate to about 55%. Looks like the good folks at the BLS heard us: it appears that the people not in the labor force exploded by an unprecedented record 1.2 million. No, that’s not a typo: 1.2 million people dropped out of the labor force in one month!

31 Jan. 2012The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index®, which had increased in December, retreated in January. The Index now stands at 61.1 (1985=100), down from 64.8 in December. The Present Situation Index declined to 38.4 from 46.5. The Expectations Index edged down to 76.2 from 77.0 in December.

Don’t say we didn’t see this coming …3 Feb. 2012 … the people not in the labor force exploded by an unprecedented record 1.2 million. Which means that the civilian labor force tumbled to a fresh 30 year low of 63.7%

Ironically, we will know when the recovery starts, because the unemployment rate will first go up as those out of the labor force try to return.

unemployment has fallen by 2% for three successive months. in one year, the number of unemployed fell by 1.2 million people while the employment-to-population ratio stayed the same. good luck trying to obscure these facts.

sesquipedalian on February 3, 2012 at 9:30 AM

You libs are struggling pretty hard to obscure the fact that The Zero cooked the books to get the numbers to look the way they do.

You and he fail to deceive. Epic Fail. Not even a half assed try.

Hopefully, enough others will see through the lie.

Zero can’t just wish all those out of work people out of existance and neither can you. They are real US citizens who have no work and little means to support themselves.

They hunger and move to cardboard Obamavilles while YOU CHEER THE DECEPTION. You should be ashamed of yourself.

And even though we all know it really isn’t, the perception will be that it is. Every politician that insists that the economy is not improving looks like a partisan hack who wants the economy to tank for political expediency.

I loathe you for what you have done.
I condemn you for condeming my children to a future of service to some sort of government.
I loathe you for influencing the minds of the innocent.
I loathe your corporate benefactors.
I loathe you.

Fight me.

And,

You’ll either lose, or I will die.

I’d love to fight you but will willingly die for Freedom.

Key West Reader on February 3, 2012 at 9:42 AM

All I do is worry for you. I mean, my God man/woman. You live in paradise. Go outside, get some sun and relax. It can’t be all that bad. As for your paranoid delusions about government enslavement, well…I don’t know maybe its time to come back in from the sun.

I thought it wasn’t about race with y’all. First someone threatens to fight me to the death, now people are throwing out comments about the President being “half-black” as if that’s some kind of disparaging attribute. HotAir…what’s happened?

The numbers are still horrible, but the Democrats have no problem being hacks and saying Obama saved the day. It this keeps up, Romney will at best be competitive. It’s good the economy is turning around, but it’s not because of Obama.

IR-MN on February 3, 2012 at 9:39 AM

Obama gets the blame when the economy is down because he is the President..I agree with that.

He should also get credit when the economy is rebounding. You are hell-bent on Obama losing re-election to the point where you want to take way credit when it is due. This very sad.

Here’s Obama’s speech in October if unemployment is 7.8%.
“We’ve brought the unemployment rate down after one of the worst economic meltdowns in American history. That meltdown was caused by Wall Street and by policies they lobbied and fought for. We finally have their mess a bit under control and now, you want to elect Mitt Romney? The candidate who has raised the most money from Wall Street this cycle? The man who made money from predatory venture capitalism? The man who is “not concerned about the poor?” America, we have a choice. We can continue on our long, road to recovery or we can hand the keys back to the folks who got us here in the first place.”

Obama wins. Congrats GOP for going for “electable.”

libfreeordie on February 3, 2012 at 9:42 AM

That’s a very big if, slick. The fact is that your guy has done pretty much everything wrong since the moment he took office. Any improvement in the economy is occurring despite your little hero’s efforts, not because of them.

This is a terible tragedy for REAL America! You’d better hope that the trend doesn’t continue or BHO will get re-elected and then take away your guns.

KeninCT on February 3, 2012 at 9:51 AM

Its an ongoing tradgedy. As long as immoral criminals control information they can warp it in any manner they choose. Thats how state propaganda works. Sadly we have far too many that refuse to see reality or think this is some kind of game.

Wow! Somebody needs to let the CBO know about this! They think that things are going to be getting worse and worse! I guess that was an “inconvenient truth”. Now THIS news today is more “politically correct”. Just like all P.C. garbage it is a very attractively wrapped, sugar-coated lie. Sorry. I don’t believe the P.C. “breaking economic news” of today; I choose to believe the “inconvenient truth” of the CBO from the other day. Isn’t America great? We have our CHOICE of mirror image information to believe!

No darling, I’m quite aware of how screwed the economy is. I just find the reaction to this post to be amusing. I don’t know if you all remember, but during the second half of the Bush Administration those of us on the left (Krugman was one) kept pointing out that the economic numbers under the Bush Administration weren’t quite as good as everyone beleived. We pointed out that under employment was very high and that the freeze in wages meant that being employed did not mean you were making enough money to live on. And certainly not making enough if some emergency popped up.

In response conservatives called the left traitorous SOB’s who hated puppies and rainbows and all that. So its kind of hilarious to see you talking about how the economic data belies the “real” economic narrative. For those at the bottom of the society the unemployment rate hasn’t meant diddly for quite a while. I’m just happy to see the right joining our narrative and hope it will continue if Willard wins in November. Somehow, *sigh* I fear that it will not.

This pile of crap is not only a lie it,s a Damn lie and for the life of i can not understand why Hot-Air would post this crap.One last question were in Gods name are all of these people who have vanish from the work force?